The life and code of a passionate developer

Where do you get hosting support?

For quite some time now, I’ve found that the options for good Rails hosting have been significantly lacking. As a consultant/contractor on a huge range of projects, I’m often asked for advice, guidance, or help in choosing and setting up servers for a client. Nearly every client or customer wants the same thing:

Stability/reliability

Flexibility/room to grow

Someone to keep things running

Someone to call when they need help

The first two options are met by a lot of providers. Tier IV datacenters, hardware redundancy, and virtualization are a dime-a-dozen nowadays and building a good Rails stack is just about the same for everyone.

However, the rub is in #3 & #4. As my colleagues, peers, and I are already work full-time writing new applications, there is precious little time for system administration and support of completed projects and old apps. Even with extensive automation, a small 1-3 person team can write many more Rails apps than they can support long-term.

Inevitably, the client wants to know “Who is going to keep things going once development is done?” and “Who can I call when things stop working?”. Set them up on a physical machines, VPSes, EC2, or anything else and the developer is left with little choice but to help keep that server running long-term. Including late night phone calls when something goes wrong. And can you honestly say you are regularly doing all the little extra things that need to be done? General maintenance? Security patches? Tuning?

So my question is: If you can get easy, scalable, on-demand hosting, why can’t you get easy, scalable, on-demand support? My answer to this issue is to launch a service that lets developers keep developing while someone else takes care of the system administration long-term: RoundHouse Support. Please read my public release announcement and then come check us out!